Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

california winter league

June 16, 2011

It’s very common for reference books and histories to refer to Ed Bolden’s Hilldale Club of the 1910s and 1920s as the Hilldale Giants. But if you read contemporary newspapers, you’ll find that the team was overwhelmingly called simply “Hilldale,” or else the “Hilldale Club,” and pretty much never the Hilldale Giants.

I think some of the confusion about the Hilldale Giants comes from this photo (from this great thread at Baseball Fever):

You’ll see many versions of this photo and details from it, most commonly Mackey and Beckwith. But it is not a photo of Ed Bolden’s Darby-based team. Instead, Hubbard, Mackey, Beckwith, Dixon, and Thomas are here shown in the uniforms of a club in the Los Angeles-based California Winter League during the 1927/28 season. Much like the Philadelphia Royal Giants, the Hilldale Giants featured some Hilldale players and were named in honor of Hilldale—but this was not the Hilldale team from the Eastern Colored League.

Here’s a box score from the California Winter League (California Eagle, January 27, 1928), with the guys in the photo batting in the #2 through #6 slots for the Hilldale Giants versus Pirrone’s All-Stars, a team of major and minor leaguers:

Perhaps adding to the confusion, there was a later team in the 1945 United States League called the Philadelphia Hilldale Giants.

Doing a quick survey of hits in digitized versions of several black weekly papers from the era (not including any California papers), I get only 17 hits for “Hilldale Giants.” Of these 8 are from 1945 and refer to the United States League, and 3 are later, retrospective mentions (two from 1985), which leaves only 6 instances of Ed Bolden’s team being called the Hilldale Giants in the contemporary press. I’d guess that these are probably due to the knee-jerk habit of referring to all black teams as “Giants,” rather than any use of Hilldale Giants as an official name.

By contrast “Hilldale Club” gets 735 mentions. Spot checks confirm these are virtually all references to the baseball team, and most seem to be using the phrase as a proper name.

June 22, 2006

The team of Negro Leaguers that toured Japan in 1927 was drawn from the Philadelphia Royal Giants club in the California Winter League of 1926/27. This team’s roster featured no less than six Hall of Famers: Turkey Stearnes (.387 with a league-leading 8 home runs), Bullet Rogan (6-2 on the mound, .328 at bat), Willie Wells (only .181, 19 for 105), Biz Mackey (.316), Bill Foster (6-0, with 49 strikeouts in 55 innings), and Andy Cooper (5-2). The Royal Giants won the pennant (of course) with a 26-11-1 record against three white teams composed mostly of a mix of major and minor leaguers, along with a handful of semipros. This was with their fourth-best pitcher, George Harney (a decent but not great knuckleballer from the Chicago American Giants) leading the team with 116 innings pitched (Cooper had 71, Rogan 68, and Foster 55).

I think you’d have to say that this would qualify as one of the great Negro League teams of all time. Rob Neyer, in his book Baseball Dynasties (co-authored with Eddie Epstein), picked the 1934-36 Pittsburgh Crawfords as the greatest Negro League team of all time, largely on the basis of their having five Hall of Famers. However, one of those, Judy Johnson, is kind of an imposter and was well past his prime by then, anyway; Oscar Charleston was still a very good, even great, hitter, but was in his late thirties; and Cool Papa Bell was certainly very good, but his reputation has probably been a bit inflated by anecdotes and hyperbole. This leaves Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, legitimate all-time greats in their primes. While none of the Royal Giants’ HOFers could measure up to those two, they were, on the other hand, nearly all in their primes (Wells was a little young, and Rogan was just past his peak, but still excellent: he’d be the Monarchs’ best hitter and pitcher in 1928). Cooper was probably the worst of the six, and he was a fine pitcher for many years, certainly as good (IMO) as the Crawfords’ number two starter, Leroy Matlock. A series between the two teams could be awfully good, but I think there’s a distinct possibility that, as Bill James might put it, the Royal Giants would beat up the Crawfords and steal their lunch money.

(Neyer and Epstein were looking for teams over three to four-year stretches—thus the title Baseball Dynasties—so the Royal Giants wouldn’t qualify, as the California Winter League teams were ad hoc affairs with rosters that shifted quite a bit from year to year.)

After the end of the California season, the Royal Giants’ owner/promoter, Lonnie Goodwin took about half the squad to Japan, including Mackey, Cooper, Rap Dixon (.349) and Frank Duncan (.276). The rest of the club, including Rogan and several of his other Monarch teammates (Newt Allen, Dink Mothel, Newt Joseph), barnstormed their way back east to Kansas City in time for opening day.

The name “Philadelphia Royal Giants,” by the way, didn’t (as far as I know) signify any special connection to Philadelphia (other than Mackey being a Hilldale star). The 1930/31 edition of the team (28-2-1 against probably weaker competition than the ‘26/27 team faced) also featured six eventual Hall of Famers: Mackey, Wells, Foster, and Cooper, plus Mule Suttles and Jud Wilson. Rounding out the ‘30/31 roster were Rap Dixon, Newt Allen, Vic Harris, Chaney White, and Chet Brewer, all very good Negro League players.

My information about the Royal Giants comes from William F. McNeil’s excellent book, The California Winter League: America’s First Integrated Professional Baseball League, a great contribution to Negro League history. The pedant in me, though, wants to point out that the subtitle should really be “North America’s First Integrated Professional Baseball League,” since Cuba is part of the Americas, and the Cuban League was integrated in 1900.